How Humans Affect The Everglades

The environment offers essential resources, like nutrients that are recycled to keep soil fertile, biological services, such as providing the global pollination of crops that we depend on for food, and natural improvements for our quality of life, such as controlling the chemistry of the atmosphere. These resources are vital to the survival of the human race, and are often taken for granted. Humans are constantly using these products and amenities to assist in their lives and consequently creating wastes that are put back into their surroundings. All people have the potential to impact the environment, both positively and negatively, directly affecting their resources available to them and the quality of life for themselves and all people on
Earth. Locally, the Everglades, a national park in South Florida, is being severely influenced by its community and in return directly impacting aspects of its local area.
People’s impact to the environment can be either by changing the local landscape, which is most prominently seen from drilling and draining, or by adding mercury to the water through runoff from factory sites. These impacts ultimately cause the wetland to become destroyed and the wildlife population to be exposed to and affected by mercury. This causes a change in Florida’s flooding patterns and the possibility of decreased biodiversity or the potential for humans to obtain mercury poisoning by ingesting an infected fish. To prevent further destruction to this local ecosystem, the people in south Florida should try to be more thoughtful before they change the landscape through drilling and draining, considering all the possible consequences that may be associated with the action, both long and short term, and more conscientious of where we dispose of our hazardous
wastes.
Nationally, even with numerous environmental laws in place and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose “mission is to protect human health and the environment ensuring that all Americans are protected from significant risks to human health and the environment where they live, learn, and work”, America is still facing environmental crises (epa.gov). The current environmental state of America is horrendous and has been getting increasingly worse over the past 40 years. (economist.com). For instance, one of the most prominent features that has been drastically worsened as a result of human actions in the United States has been aquifer depletion. This can be seen by saltwater intrusion if they are located in a close proximity to the ocean. Also, sinkholes occur over aquifers and land near them over time as a direct result of American’s massive amount of pumping water for agriculture, drinking, and mechanical processes. These results in return create a pandemic to find clean drinking water for the people of the United States. One possible solution to this issue, to decrease the rate at which the aquifers are degrading or even potentially reverse this process, would be to slow down the country’s pumping rate and hopefully stop the issues of sinkholes and saltwater intrusion, which are irreversible.
Globally, the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil is the largest and most diverse in the world, covering 2.124 million square miles and being a home to one in ten species known in the world (smashlists.com).
This ecological community has major impacts on Brazil and the globe. For example, the rainforest acts as a carbon sink, taking in excess carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by humans, and releasing oxygen, a useable and less hazardous form for humans and all animals. Services such as these cannot be carried out with the adverse effects human actions have had on the rainforest, such as deforestation. Another result of deforestation is the forest area loses its ability to hold water. Because of this, there is an increase in flooding and landslides, directly affecting the surrounding areas in South America. The Rainforest’s global impact is severe because of its incredible size. It has the potential to change the climate, including precipitation patters and air concentrations. If mankind wants to improve, or at least stop degrading the rainforest, we should ban logging and start to replant and rebuild the
ecosystem.
Ultimately, it is clear that the actions we are taking as humans as a whole are detrimental to the environment, ecosystems around us, and even our own quality of life. The adverse effects we pose to the environment have the potential to directly harm us as humans. In order to prevent this to keep occurring and increasingly getting worse, humans should enact more general environmental protection laws and take action to rebuild and reverse our effects we have already had.